More Secrets of the Half-blood Prince
by fanfic n00b
Summary: A few of Snape's memories that weren't in the pensieve. Lost years, private thoughts. Spanning two and a half decades. Canon-compliant.


**A/N All characters are J. K. Rowling's. **

* * *

Severus Snape is thirteen. Riding the train back to King's Cross. He's watching London rise up out of green fields dotted with sheep. The train rushes over bridges and through tunnels covered in graffiti. The vibration of the train is rhythmic, like blood whooshing through a jugular.

In their compartment, he looks down at Lil, and she's sleeping, a red tangle of hair and a brown wool jacket. In her hands, the magazine she was reading- _The Potioner's Weekly_. And he thinks, _This is mine_. He smiles, and the smile overflows his thin face. He looks punch-drunk.

When the train finally stops, she wakes. She stretches her arms and yawns. A groggy angel.

They jump down to the platform.

"It's so much warmer in London!" she exclaims, taking off her jacket. Her shoulders are covered in freckles. He thinks they are like constellations of a brighter universe.

_This is mine. _Not school, not home, but between them, in these stolen hours.

...

He's fifteen. Sharing Lil's cigarette on the astronomy tower. This is the longest sustained eye contact they've had all year.

He tastes her lipgloss on the filter. It's not a kiss. But it's close enough.

….

He's sixteen. All of their conversations end in arguments these days.

He has cornered her outside the Three Broomsticks.

"Why?" he asks.

"You know why," she says, her voice dripping with derision.

"I don't, Lil! I don't."

"Sod off, Sev. You're a decent occlumens, but I effing _know_ you."

_You are the only one who knows me, _he thinks.

He manages to get a merciful half-smile out of her, though. Maybe it was the hangdog look on his face. Temporary salvation.

Later, she buys him a sugar quill in apology. He doesn't like sugar quills- has no sweet tooth whatsoever in fact- but standing with her outside Honeydukes', he allows the cherry sugar to dissolve on his tongue like the things he wants to say to her.

He can feel their friendship coming apart, but if he can just think of the right words, maybe he can make it stop. Or maybe it can be transformed, alchemically, into love. Not the sisterly love she bestows upon him with her sad little smiles, but something radiant. Passionate. Unambiguous.

….

O.W.L.s are over. _Everything_ is over.

He has said the worst possible thing to her. He would cut out his tongue if that would make things right.

...

Seventh year. She's sleeping with _him_. Severus can tell. The way her hips sway easily when she crosses the castle courtyard to him- _him!_- with his stupid glasses and studiedly untidy hair. Although Lily no longer speaks to him, he doesn't need to hear it to confirm what he knows. You don't share fags and confidences for years and then _not_ notice.

He watches them, the love of his life and that unfathomable prick, their breath visible in the chill February air. Laughing. She's fogging up his glasses with her breath. He's adjusting her scarf in a sort of fussy, vain way, as if he's worried about how her sloppiness reflects on him. _Twat_. Doesn't he know that Lil is _supposed_ to be messy, full of life, askew? Her bedroom back home is a bloody disaster area. He used to spend hours there, breathing in the smell of her that was on every surface, enduring endless loops of her Ziggy Stardust LP, tripping over piles of stuffed animals and books. Lil is _messy_. It is an essential part of her. James Potter completely misses the point, as usual.

Another thing Severus has noticed: Lil doesn't smoke anymore. This vice is now his alone.

His longing metastacizes into anguish and jealousy.

He continues to play the long game, pinning his hopes on the rise of the Dark Lord. _Everything will change. _Including her. Somehow, it will all work out. This aberration with Potter is only temporary.

...

_A boy born at the end of July?_

He didn't even know she was pregnant. Much less that she'd already had a baby. Has it really been that many years? In his mind's eye, she is still a teenage girl, fists full of gillyweed.

Unbidden, a new image flashes into his brain: Lily, a little older, a Botticelliesque Madonna with a round belly and a serene smile. The image jolts his abandoned instincts back to life. What did she call him once? "Overprotective." His wand arm convulses reflexively.

And then he realizes it, slowly, as if the thoughts are weary pilgrims crossing a desert: _he thinks it means her._ He thinks it means her son. He's going to hunt her down and kill her.

...

1981. The worst year of his life. He smashes every mirror he owns.

...

The next decade is a blur: smoking. Errands for Dumbledore. Fetching. Obeying.

If he was a knight errant in his youth, he is a monk now. He even sleeps in a cell. But if he is honest with himself, a lifetime of atonement is not enough. Several lifetimes would not be enough.

...

He lacks the gravitas of older teachers, and lacks the warmth of other ones. At first, he doesn't openly mock or deride students. He focuses on _precision_. But in his first term, he realizes he's doing it wrong when a few girls in his N.E.W.T. class start hanging around after the hour is over, commenting pointlessly on preserved things in jars. _Flirting._ Perhaps his misery comes across as sympathetic to them. Perhaps this is what happens to any professor under forty. Either way- a_bsolutely unequivocally NOT_.

He changes tack: he lets himself be condescending, demanding, like a prima ballerina forced to tutor particularly clumsy children. That suits him better. His natural misanthropy is put to good use. This campaign is so successful that within the year, the students forget that he was ever any different.

...

He has a brief affair with the slightly plump, redheaded wife of a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. She is Czech, and she has an Eastern Bloc mystique, which he doesn't _like_ per se, but doesn't despise, either. She doesn't smile or laugh much. He doesn't solicit it, but she knocks on the door of his dungeon room one night, like a stray cat, with her intention clear upon her round little face, and he lets her in. She doesn't ask about his "tattoo"; in fact, she doesn't ask questions at all, which is ideal. Predictably, she and her husband are gone by the end of the year. He never sees her again.

...

One summer, he returns to Spinner's End. His father has died of lymphoma and his mother has moved abroad, so he has effectively inherited the old house. He loathes it, and yet there may be some of Lily in the dust of the place, a few skin cells, a stray hair- so he keeps it, and fills it wall-to-wall with books.

The first week, he sees a doe in the dark driveway at midnight. Incongruously, here, in front of his old house. Her black nose shining with moonlight, her ears turned toward him. For a moment he is terrified that she'll be hit by a car. The symbolism of this would be... upsetting. Then she runs away behind a clump of bushes and he can't find her again.

...

He's vaguely aware of current events. Sometimes he listens to moody pop songs on the WWN while brewing increasingly complex, experimental potions. He publishes papers in wizarding academic journals. He reads voraciously, as always. Muggle books too- because although this _conversion_, or whatever it is, has not made him forget his past opinions entirely, he finds himself not discriminating when it comes to books.

Somewhere out there, he muses, is a boy with Lil's eyes. He imagines this boy, growing up in a muggle suburb, like himself, like Lil. Honestly, he would be much happier if she had left a _daughter _instead of a son. It would be so much easier to vow to protect a daughter. She might even look like Lil. For a moment, that idea is interesting... however, having recently finished a certain Nabokov novel, he has another thought that makes him shudder with revulsion. Humbert Humbert he is not.

Ultimately, it wasn't Lily's youth or her beauty (or even the slim possibility that she might one day let him kiss that place above her clavicle where her pulse fluttered nakedly) that had mattered to him. It was _her_. Her compassion, her endearing little flaws, her prodigious magical ability- all of her, and her _specifically_. He had realized this during the tense weeks between his defection to Dumbledore and her death. So it's not going to be about finding some _other_ pretty redhead who laughs like a shaken champagne bottle (explosively) or about satisfying his own desire in any number of other ways. This thing he is doing next- it is about honoring her and what is left of her.

It's just that it would be easier somehow if this person he's sworn to protect was a girl.

But no, she did not leave a daughter. She left a son.

….

A chance encounter: a miserable-looking woman in an awful pastel hat crosses the street toward him. She is alone.

"Petunia," he nods, lighting a fag and blowing smoke in her direction.

She scowls at him and walks back the way she came.

He could almost laugh. Or throw another branch at her.

….

"Potter, Harry."

The sorting hat takes a long time to decide, but Severus has already decided: The kid doesn't look like Lily at all. _At. Fucking. All._

….

The next six years are worse. When Harry Potter was just a far-away, unseen abstraction, it was easier to bear this vow, this atonement. Now, though, Potter is omnipresent. It seems like he wills himself to be everywhere, his name on everyone's lips, his face- so like his contemptible father's, so little like his mother's- on every newspaper.

Once in a great while, though, those green eyes meet his, and Severus feels a horrible swooping sensation, like being dropped from a great height. It never registers on his face. She called him a _decent_ occlumens once- but now he is a master.

Needling the boy is the only possible way to interact. But even if he _could_ choose how to feel when he looks at Potter, he probably would not choose differently.

...

Sometimes he wakes from dreams in which he has had long conversations with her. He cannot remember what either of them said- incoherent dream-logic and vain wish-fulfillment, he guesses- but bits of these dreams stick with him all day. The particular way she used to say her r's. _Seve**r**us_._ Amo**r**tentia._ He had almost forgotten.

Other times, the dreams are just her singing in her slightly pitchy alto. _I'll stick with you, baby, for a thousand years, nothing's gonna touch you in these golden ye-e-ears..._

...

Summer at Spinner's End again. Narcissa Malfoy turns up in the rain, looking half-drowned.

"Bring us drinks, Wormtail."

Demeaning Peter Pettigrew is almost pleasurable. If it's true he was their secret keeper, then Peter as good as killed Lily, and he, Severus, is now in the position to exact revenge in amusing little ways.

And now Narcissa is weeping. Her tears bring him dangerously close to commiseration, which he can neither risk nor abide. He makes her a curiously familiar promise: to watch over her son. How many sons will he vow to protect before this war is over?

...

Sometimes, across the courtyard, he sees that Weasley girl standing next to the boy, trailing her fingers absently through his hair. From a far enough distance, the sight of them is horribly like the sight of Lily with James Potter. _Twenty points from Gryffindor._

...

Detention again. The boy is sorting cards for Filch.

The room is quiet, except for the brushing of paper and the scratching of quill.

Is this the last time he will see the boy alive? Now that he knows Dumbledore has been playing him for a fool, that he does not intend that the boy should live-

This could be it. He could say something. Do something. Warn the boy, or make peace, or do a thousand other things, which Lil would effing do if she were here, because she wore her heart on her sleeve.

But Lily is not here. And he is not Lily. Fifteen years of repentance have changed him into someone she would've liked more- slurs offend him, deaths of acquaintances move him- but all that notwithstanding, he is nothing like Lily. He cannot act for her, cannot do and say things the way she would have done and said them.

He dismisses the boy and says no more.

...

_So much blood. _It's such a stupidly obvious thought, he muses. But time has slowed down- or has it sped up?- and his vocabulary is ebbing along with his life.

How and why Harry Potter is here now, he cannot fathom.

He pulls the boy close and looks into those green eyes that are the mirror of hers.

C_ome get me_, he thinks. C_ome fetch me at last. _

The last image in his mind before the darkness: a fifteen-year-old girl sharing his cigarette, her head so close to his shoulder, and he wishes she would lean on him, so he could feel the warm weight of her.


End file.
